Faking it
Having re-organised my showreel, it’s clear there are a couple of gaps – areas in which the work I’ve done so far either isn’t stuff I can or want to show off, or just isn’t varied enough to appeal to the markets I know are out there…

The most obvious of these is web banners and intros. Video on the web has only really exploded into everyday sites in the past couple of years, and it’s only now people are starting to get the idea they can create intro screens and banners with content as rich as you’d get on TV – that means I’ve only done a couple of such projects (all in the last few months, which I guess is the point).

So I spent Friday faking work – producing a whole showreel of banners and intros… based on fictitious companies and made-up products.

See if you can work out which in this showreel are real and which are created for the showreel….

It’s not really a cheat – there’s no difference between a piece of work done to show off what you can do and one done for an actual commission except that commissions often don’t let you show off your skills to the same extent, so I don’t feel I’m making any false claims by introducing these elements – a showreel is just there to show what you can produce…

In the same spirit, I decided my main showreel was a bit limited in the area of combining video and shot footage, so I added a couple of “pop video” clips just to show I can work with people as well as cg sharks!

One I did in a very clean graphical style, the other, I gave a much more grungy treatment.



I think what people find hard to grasp when looking at showreels is that ANYTHING is now possible with CG. The problem is that unless you know your way around the software, you can’t really say what’s very easy and what will add weeks of design time to a project, and that’s probably where clients find it hard to work out what they can afford to do.

Maybe I should produce an effects crib-sheet for commissioning clients to let people know what’s easy and what’s hard…

Maybe when I’ve got a minute….

Wall Street Crash
… which right now I haven’t – primarily because at about 5:30 on Friday, the company I created a series of Mexican wrestlers for a month or so ago contacted me with another commission.

As before, the deadline was Wednesday (remember, Saturday and Sunday are the weekend, Monday was a bank holiday and Tuesday I’m looking after George)... and as before, the company are operating out of blackberries – so all communication for this complex project has to come in the form of ambiguous text messages.

What it turns out they want is a video clip to look like a videogame for a proposed Wall Street trading game. I have to fill an empty trading room with CG traders all standing around chatting, and place a player character in among them….

It’s not an easy job to animate a whole crowd of people in a couple of days.

I think I’ve nailed it now, but I did have to do some work over the weekend, and getting it done for the deadline was very tight… I was working until half ten last night.

I usually have a strict rule about weekends and evenings, but with this, it was either accept a little overtime, or not take the job on….

It looks like with the success of my advertising campaign, turning down work is something I’m going to have to get used to doing… it just never seems to be the right time to do it, but I’m going to have to find a way if I’m ever to get back to my documentaries!

New website
I’ve finally got round to updating my website – on Monday I put together and uploaded a new showreel and today I’ve been re-designing the still images side.

Updating your portfolio website always involves a little self-reinvention. Each picture or clip you decide to include goes a little way to building up the picture visitors will have of you. And if you use the site for getting work, as I do, then you’re not only saying who you are, but who you’d like to be. You’re not just choosing your best work – I’m leaving out quite a lot of my best work – you’re choosing the work that you think is most likely to get the future commissions you’re after.

And that means some tough decisions. I thought about how to restructure it long and hard – after all, from my google advertising, I’m getting (roughly) one enquiry per week from about 800 clicks. In other words out of 800 people visiting my site, 1 decides to email me. That’s OK in sales terms, but I should be able to improve on it. Not least so that I can reduce my advertising spending!

And the conclusion I came to was this:

My website up to now has been about me. It’s been a boasting forum for me to let people know what a great artist and animator I am. All the decisions I’ve made about what to put up there have been about showing off the strength and variety of my work.

But I don’t need to do that.

I don’t need to show people that I can do 3d design and animation – that’s clear from the pictures. I don’t need to impress the visitors to my site because if they’re going to be impressed, they will be anyway.

If they were artists or animators themselves, they’d be doing the work themselves so they’re not looking at the mastery of different techniques – they’re looking for examples of the kind of work they need.

What I need to do is show them that I can produce what they’re looking for – that they can come to me with a brief – however vague – and that I can transform it into something that will work well in whatever they’re doing.

So, up to now, my website has been divided into sections for prehistoric art, science images, animation, etc.

What I need is to focus far more on sales – and that means directing visitors to images that mean something to them….

Reconstructions
Business communication
Advertising images
Illustration
Web graphics
Education
Editorial

Each section will probably only contain a few images, and there will be some overlap, but they’ll be very finely aimed at specific clients.


For video work – I think I’ll only do one video, but I’ll include buzz-words to make it clear what some of the clips relate to

Documentaries
Web animations
Music videos
Advertising
Logos
Videogames
Visualization
Title animations

It’s not quite finished, but the majority of it’s up there…www.darkin.demon.co.uk